Then a pile of heads he laid—
Thirty thousands heaped on high—
All to please the Kafir maid,
Where the Oxus ripples by,
Grimly spake Atulla Khan:—
"Love hat made this thing a Man."
—"Oatta's Story", opening poem to Rudyard Kipling's 'His Chance in Life' from Plain Tales from the Hills
"The ride's a little bumpy on the famous Road of Skulls..."
— "Road of Skulls"
BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD! SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE!!!
— Khornate Berserkers in general, Warhammer 40,000
DM: Suddenly, a great rumbling shakes the caverns. The walls crack open, and thousands of skulls are released!
Legolas: Oh crap.
DM: They tumble down from above, forming a great avalanche of death. The horrid sight is-
Aragorn: Skulls? Like, only skulls?
DM: Yeah.
Aragorn: But that makes no sense!
DM: It's just a trap! Dungeons have them all the time.
Aragorn: I'm not calling the device into question. I'm questioning the payload. Thousands and thousands of skulls? How does that work, exactly? Was this a race of floating heads?
Legolas: Maybe they have another trap which just drops arms and legs.
Gimli: I'll bet this was a robust culture. Imagine their funerals... "Oops, Granny's dead, let's lop off her head and chuck it into the big bin to be dropped on adventurers."
Aragorn: This is the first trap I've ever encountered that could be triggered by negotiations. I wonder how long it takes them to reset the trap every time it goes off?
Gimli: (possibly) Conan's Codpiece! It's like we're in a big bowl of Cap'n Crunch.
Aragorn: No problem, I'll just roll my saving throw vs. ridiculous contrivances.
The statues ended in a vast atrium, a hundred metres a side, surrounding an open sarcophagus. Offerings from a more recent holocaust were stacked in great piles - thousands of R'larri skulls, many with the cranium sliced off. Flowering vines had sprouted amongst sun-whitened bone, elegant blooms of yellow and red through empty eye sockets and exposed brainpans. Seven studied them with detached curiosity, taking a picture with the Doctor's holocamera.
— The Flux of Mortal Things, a Star Trek: Voyager fanfic
"So many groups of disembodied heads have come before me and failed."
Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People 4: Dangeresque 3
Vipsania: So, this Hydrargyros — did you know him well?
Franz: Eh. We dragons don't get chummy. [...] To be honest, he really wasn't what you'd call scintillating company. Cranky, touchy, a real grouch. Not a people-friendly kinda guy like me.
Humongulus: (off-panel) Behold! Humongulus has found yet another artistically-stacked pyramid of skulls!
Vipsania: (to Franz) Apparently not.
"I wonder where their bodies are?"
— Guybrush Threepwood, The Curse of Monkey Island
When he died
Turns out he left behind
A mansion full of other people's skulls
The odd thing was, they never found his own
When he died
Turns out he left behind
A mansion full of other people's skulls
The odd thing was, they never found his own
When he died
— Lemon Demon, "When He Died"
